Path.To's Social Media Mojo Transforms Your Facebook Posts Into A New Job

And by mojo, of course, we mean algorithm. Here's how job-matching site Path.To digs into your online life (not in a creepy way) to help find the right job for you. That banging noise you hear is one more nail going into the resume's coffin.

Get ready for a world where whether you land a particular job doesn't depend so much on what's written on your resume, or even on glowing references former employers, but instead, on information about you floating around the web.

We're not talking about those pictures of you doing keg stands at Theta Nu. Rather, the recruiting algorithms of the future are going to be trolling social media sites as well as industry-related communities like GitHub and Dribbble, where they'll assess your skills, reputation, and passion in certain areas based on your participation there and then factor those findings into their calculations about how well suited you are for specific job openings.

Path.To, a Jacksonville, Florida-based startup, is doing just that. Its new service, which launches today, scours your online activity as well as the resume information you input to calculate how well matched you are to the various jobs employers have posted on its site. It then shares those ratings with you, so you can see which jobs you might be a good fit for. And it also passes them on to employers, in the form of a list of candidates most suited to their openings.

The company is currently only focusing on the software and design jobs, and it's only open to companies in the Bay Area. (Eventbrite, Evernote, Lytro, and Uber are among the 100 companies that have signed up to use it.) But the ultimate goal is to expand to the entire workforce.

"We're trying to get a deeper understanding of the job seeker—their personality, their work experience, and their passion," cofounder and CEO Darren Bounds tells Fast Company.

Recruiting is broken in many industries says Bounds, a veteran of Taleo, a talent enterprise software company. Simply matching a candidate to a job based on a list of skills is no longer sufficient information to evaluate whether the person is going to be a good hire.

Taking a look at a candidate's online activity, which will also include public Facebook and Twitter postings, can tell you how much passion a person has for the subject matters they'll be dealing with, Bounds says. It can also give clues about how well regarded the candidate is, based on who's following them.

Bounds says the information Path.To collects this way will only be "additive"—it will act as bonus points, as it were, underlining someone's fit for a particular position. The information, he says, will never be used to knock points off a candidate's score.

Path.To is targeting the tech community in the Bay Area in part because of its notorious hiring crunch. Tech companies, Bounds says, are falling into two camps these days. They're either getting inundated with applicants, many of them unqualified, because they're the hot companies of the moment, or they're aren't getting enough applicants because candidates haven't heard of them.

A system like Path.To will help, Bounds says, because it will do a better job of separating the wheat from chaff for the inundated companies, and match-make between smaller companies and candidates who very well might enjoy working in those places but just don't know enough about them.

"We're trying to level the playing field, by helping you find the company you're best suited to work at," Bounds says.

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I think this is an example of how not to hire people. How many companies want to be seen as stalking their potential employees facebook postings with their friends for clues about what they are like. An major privacy invasion for a blackbox promise that they will find the right company for you? Sorry, I don't want my facebook page crawled by these guys and I'm guessing this is a Pathto bankruptcy for this creepy idea.